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 July 13, 2007
Susan Newman, Mount Rainier Recovery Intern
This past week, we embarked on our first multi-day, backcountry trail work project. For five straight days last week there was a group of four corps members and one volunteer fixing up the Huckleberry Creek Trail in the northeast corner of the park, returning after work each evening to their cozy base camp 2 miles away from any trailhead. Program Director Jill Baum and I went out to help them for a day and a half. It was my first experience backcountry camping.
The backcountry crew, made up of Sam Commarto, Chas Robles, Hanna O’Connell, Margaret Dike, and volunteer (and SCA alumn) Lauren Baras, had already spent a day out at the site when Jill and I set out. We arrived at the camp at dinner time. The camp was set up near a cabin on the trail right next to Huckleberry Creek. The creek was stunning, cool and clear and there were huckleberries, vanilla leaf, and bunchberry carpeting the ground all around the site. After a few delicious sweet potato burritos, we had just enough light to set up our tent and play a rousing game of Harry Potter Uno before we hit our sleeping bags. The sound of the creek just a few feet away put us all to sleep quickly. We woke up early for oatmeal. I did my first ever swill (pouring a little water in your dish, swishing it around, and drinking it to clean it out). It was an oatmeal swill, so it went down nice and easy.
After breakfast we cleaned up and headed up the trail about a mile to where the crew had been working the day before. They were building a bog bridge – basically a flattened log called a stringer set on small logs called sills to form an elevated surface over water. The crew had already cut out and moved the logs and chiseled a flat walking surface on the stringer the day before. So, three crewmembers immediately got to work on the next step: chiseling notches on the stringer so that it will rest snugly on the sills.
 I joined the rest of the crew as they headed further on to the next bridge needing repair. We began the work there by sawing a felled tree to the correct length to be this bridge’s stringer. To complete this work, we used a cross-cut saw, which is my new favorite tool – it cuts through wood like butter!
By lunch time we’d cut the log to size and scored about half the log’s side for walking. Also by lunch time, the other bridge was completely finished! We ate our lunch while sitting on the new bridge.
Jill and I had to pack out after lunch to get back to Longmire, but I would have loved to stay in the backcountry building bridges. It was a very satisfying day and I wish I could have stayed all week.
There will be many more multi-day, backcountry crews heading out in the coming weeks. These crews are especially important to Mount Rainier Recovery efforts. “Because of the remote nature of these projects” says Willie Ehrenclou, Field Coordinator, “only a dedicated crew willing to rough it in the wild can make this valuable contribution to the flood recovery effort.”
Take a vacation and give back to Rainier at the same time; you can sign up for multi-day backcountry trips in green on the events calendar.
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